New Avengers trailer, now in HD

This is the best trailer to date, very clean looking and you get a good look at the charcters and the basic plot and some nifty action. The Hulk is kind of odd looking, but other than that . . .

Matt Kenseth wins the 37 Hours of Daytona

Matt Kenseth won The Race that Wouldn't End®, otherwise known as the Daytona 500 sometime around 1:00am Tuesday morning.

Congrats to Matt for winning NASCAR's season opener -- this year a wild and wooly thing that included a lap two wreck that took out Jimmie Johnson and media sensation Danica Patrick, among others. Also, late in the race, Juan Pablo Montoya's car broke while trying to catch up to the field, and sent him spinning into one of the track dryers, causing a horrific crash that ignited the jet fuel in the truck that burned for what seemed like forever.

Both Montoya and the truck's driver came out of the crash okay, and track and NASCAR officials did an incredible job putting out the wild fire and repaired the track to get the race back under way.

My boy Tony Stewart came in 16th, and Danica managed to get her car fairly well back together to finish the race running, but tons of laps down.

But here's my thing -- and if you've read my stuff before you know what's coming: NASCAR effed with these cars in the off-season, claiming they were responding to "the fans" whom they claimed wanted a return to the old pack style of restrictor plate racing.

The changed the aero package and the cooling systems to prevent the so-called "2 car tango" that allowed multiple lead changes during a race. Mission accomplished guys. What we had this race was that once someone got in the lead, you couldn't get around them. There was only one workable lane in the race -- at the bottom. Even prior to the 2-car phenomenon, they could get 2 and 3 lanes of cars freight-training on the track. Not now.

If this is what NASCAR officials and those fans they claim entreated them consider exciting, I'd like them to explain it to me. It was dreadfully boring!

Every restart, once Kenseth got in the lead, all he did was swing up a lane to collect his teammate, they dropped down blocking the lower lane and Kenseth could have tooled around the track with his arm out the window. No one was going to get around him. The announcers even made note of the fact that no one could get the high lane to work. Where's the excitement in that?

The announcers spent all race toeing the company line about how this style of racing is preferable, but I'd love to get those guys off the record to hear what they really think.

Oh well, like I said, congrats to Matt for the win. Nice they finally got the race done. And it's on to Phoenix.

I think Ann Coulter just had an orgasm

"If Gov. Romney were to come and talk to me about it, I would listen because I love my party enough and I love my country enough to listen."

That was NJ Gov Chris Christie speaking on CBS' Face the Nation Sunday on whether he would accept a VP nod from ole Flip Flop if the opportunity arose.

Given Ann's bizarre attraction to RINO's these days -- her current shilling for Mittens, and previous wet panties slobbering over Christie, I don't think she'll be in any state to do her television commitments for the next day or two as she comes down from the ecstatic high she must have gotten from hearing those words come out of Christie's mouth.

Anna Faris & Milla Jovovich for the win

This is based on a quick glimpse through various thumbnail sized images from the red carpet at this year's Academy Awards. But I'm thinking it's pretty much a tie between Anna Faris and Milla Jovovich for who I thought looked the best last night:

The short, blonde bob Anna's rocking is pretty cute on her, though I wouldn't mind so much if she'd lay off the lip injections.

And Milla just looks wonderful -- the pale skin with the perfect red lipstick, the hair . . . woof. Both she and Anna had dresses that fit perfectly, weren't too crazy with the cut or style and both women have the bodies to pull off those dresses.

Looking good, ladies :-)

Update:
One of the celeb sites I cruise through was trying to suggest that pinched-face Tina Fey out glammed Milla on the red carpet. Heh. Tina Fey is a one-trick pony clinging desperately to her character assasination of Sarah Palin for relevence. Her vaunted tv show is in the toilet ratings wise, but these celeb blogs, that mostly lean precipitously left, just continue to fawn over Tina because of her sole dubious achievement.

Nice try folks, but epic fail on your part.

Sarah Palin is nominated . . .

. . . for a 2012 Razzie Award.

Seriously?!

Is there no end to liberal's hatred of this woman?

Link

*sigh* There you go again . . .

I like Breitbart's Bigs, always lots of good stuff there. Occasionally a clunker, case in point:

This post from the other day. A contributer named Jason Hart went on a bender about Senator Sherrod Brown's efforts to keep the U.S. Post Office solvent and in one piece. Apparently, Mr. Hart has a bone to pick with the Ohio Senator, perhaps because Jason is from Ohio originally. But he does what so many conservative bloggers, who hate on anything government or union do -- simply grab the easiest data and smear a few hundred thousand hard-working, tax paying citizens.

In his piece, Jason states the following:

"USPS has been running deficits for years and is losing roughly a billion dollars a month, but Progressives won’t acknowledge market realities or admit the postal union’s demands are insane."

What market realities? And what union demands? Jason, of course doesn't mention those, instead using . . . dare I say it, conservative dog whistle terms like "union's demands" that he knows readers and commentors will greedily lap up.

If he had done even the most minimal of research, Jason might have found that the PO's first quarter statement showed an operational profit of $200 million for fiscal 2012! The $3.3 billion loss is entirely due to the pre-funding payment of disability and retirement pensions. A requirement that no other public or private business in the country is required to do. The requirement is to pre-fund these pensions 75 years into the future.

Jason takes the boilerplate conservative stance on this pre-funding that is bankrupting the USPS and states mockingly:

"...[Sen] Brown's big idea is to stop requiring USPS to sock money away in advance? This is a Progressive solution through and through – we’re running out of cash, so stop saving and spend, spend, spend!

No, dumbass! The idea is that if pre-funding 75 years into the future is putting you in debt now, and forcing you to borrow money to pay your bills, perhaps you can scale back on the pre-funding while you restructure to stay competitive!

Jeez Jason, what's your degree in anyway? *pulls up bio* Ahh, a BS in Management Information Systems -- a degree grounded in the Liberal Arts and focusing on Network Management and Security, Database Technologies Management, Enterprise Systems Management, and Web Site Design and Development (according to NYU website). So for building a nifty website or running an IT department, you might be the guy. Running a multi-billion dollar business that employs over 500,000 people . . . eh, maybe you're not so much.

At another point in his article, Jason snarks about a quote from Sen. Brown in an online petition:

"The postal service has been very restricted in what its [sic] allowed to do under law. It’s not been given opportunities to generate revenue..."

Jason points out, showing his own ignorance of the subject matter, that the PO has a monopoly on first class mail delivery and the suggests that Sen. Brown is "incredibly stupid" for making that statement.

Hey Jason, you know who else has made the exact same complaint about revenue generation? The Postmaster General. Maybe you should level the same insult at him.

But no, to Jason, the PMG is the good guy battling the evil, powerful and corrupt unions to save the embattled Post Office. Hart questions who has the "better grip" on postal finances -- PM Donahoe or Sen. Brown?

Well, here's my thing -- PM Donahoe, like every other manager in the postal service, is in management because he was either unwilling or unable to do craft work. Plain and simple. Patrick Donahoe was not promoted from craft based on merit. He went into management because he either lost his position in the clerk craft or decided he couldn't do it anymore and wanted a desk job. That he matriculated to the top of the Post Office is the Peter Principle in action.

So in response to Jason's question . . . it is quite possible that Sen. Brown is more qualified to make business decisions than the Postmaster General.

Part of the problem is that no one ever checks the PO's data on anything, they just accept the numbers that come out of the PMG's office as gospel. That's like going to the guy embezzling money from the bank and asking him for the records to catch the embezzler. Duhrr

This was pointed out nicely in Michigan recently when Sen. Levin stated that the Post Office had given them a savings estimate for closing a number of offices and processing facilities "...but no data on how these figures were reached..."

The Post Office has only been running deficits since 2006. The same year that it was forced by the government to begin this huge pre-funding program. Prior to that, the Post Office was already funding it's retirement/disability programs at a manageble pace. To suggest that to stave off the conservative bug-a-boo of unfunded pension liabilites by pre-funding them to such an extent as to put a business into bankrupcy and/or force it to be bailed out by the government is sheer stupidity.

Perhaps if Mr. Hart took more than intro courses in economics, he might know that.

I don't care if Jason dislikes Sherrod Brown as a Senator. He can rail against him all he likes. But as we are learning in the current Republican primary season -- not every decision, law, or bill put forward by a government representative can be hated on for purely partisan reasons.

So naturally, we have a rain delay

Been waiting all this time for NASCAR to get going again and what do we get? Typical wierd Florida February weather -- cold and rainy at the track, bone dry just a couple of miles south.

Watching the pre-race drag-it-out preliminaries. Anything interesting?

I'm likin' Lenny Kravitz's drummer. Dude looks like he's having a blast back there.

The Danica interview was horrible. Not all her fault as DW seemed oddly unprepared to ask her questions about anything important.

For a guy who spends so much time flapping his gums about the sport, NASCAR head guy Mike Helton doesn't come off very comfortable in front of the camera. Just answer the question Mikey -- gonna postpone until Monday if the rain doesn't stop? How tough a question is that?

Speaking of which, NASCAR just couldn't stand the very cool nature of the old 2-car tango from the last couple of seasons, so they screwed up the cars by making the rear spoiler smaller and the rear bumper bigger. So we're back to the big pack, wreck-in-waiting, style of driving again. Just ask Danica, Jeff Gordon, and Kyle Busch how nice that is. Could have lost three drivers already, simply for the sake of so-called old school racing. Idiots!

Oh yeah, not race related but the commercial for the new GI Joe movie -- Bruce Willis and The Rock? Might be substantially better than the first one.

Update:
And just like that (@5:10pm) the Daytona 500 is put off until noon on Monday. Good thing I'm off work tomorrow. heh

Update #2:
Looks like its still raining in Daytona, so they've pushed the race back to 7:00pm tonight (Monday). It might still rain during the race, so if they make it to the half-way point, and it rains we may get a rain shortened race again. Tuesday's an option, but not a good one because it jams up the teams travel schedules.